Escaping the Dark Forest

[NomoneyNohoney]

https://samczsun.com/escaping-the-dark-forest/

On September 15, 2020, a small group of people worked through the night to rescue over 9.6MM USD from a vulnerable smart contract.

(first seen on Reddit 10/2/2020)

[XFool]

...Well I'm glad we've cleared that up!

[bungeejumper]

Would I regret it very much if I asked how the hell you came to be reading that weird stuff in the first place? It sounds like a bad case of Tolkien meets the Matrix. Can't wait to see it on Netflix. Well, all right, maybe I can. Indefinitely.

BJ

[NomoneyNohoney]

Glad you enjoyed it so much, a little light story telling is always uplifting /s
I wonder if you'd be interested in the post that spawned this one, in its own way?
https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereu ... c5f0505dff

It's like the H.R. Giger of literature.

Quite how I ended up in this backwater, I can't recall, and as any good internet explorer knows, we don't keep our histories ;o)

[NomoneyNohoney]

Oh look, I pre-empted your question in the original post - it was spawned on Reddit...

[GrahamPlatt]

This rather reminds me of a book I read years ago. It was written almost as a novel, but was the true history of an academic in the US noticing a 1 cent (or equivalent) discrepancy in a mainframe’s accounting system. He (it was a he) did a forensic analysis and found the first ever evidence of international hacking. Turns out it was a Russian group. I recall a handle “Benson & Hedges” for one of the hackers, but damned if I can remember either the author or title of said book. A good read as I recall.

[Itsallaguess]

This rather reminds me of a book I read years ago. It was written almost as a novel, but was the true history of an academic in the US noticing a 1 cent (or equivalent) discrepancy in a mainframe’s accounting system.

He (it was a he) did a forensic analysis and found the first ever evidence of international hacking. Turns out it was a Russian group. I recall a handle “Benson & Hedges” for one of the hackers, but damned if I can remember either the author or title of said book. A good read as I recall.

It was called 'The Cuckoo's Egg' -

Author Clifford Stoll, an astronomer by training, managed computers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California. One day in 1986 his supervisor, Dave Cleveland, asked him to resolve an accounting error of 75 cents in the computer usage accounts. Stoll traced the error to an unauthorized user who had apparently used nine seconds of computer time and not paid for it. Stoll eventually realized that the unauthorized user was a hacker who had acquired superuser access to the LBNL system by exploiting a vulnerability in the movemail function of the original GNU Emacs.

Early on, and over the course of a long weekend, Stoll rounded up fifty terminals, as well as teleprinters, mostly by “borrowing” them from the desks of co-workers away for the weekend. These he physically attached to the fifty incoming phone lines at LBNL. When the hacker dialed in that weekend, Stoll located the phone line used, which was coming from the Tymnet routing service. With the help of Tymnet, he eventually tracked the intrusion to a call center at MITRE, a defense contractor in McLean, Virginia. Over the next ten months, Stoll spent enormous amounts of time and effort tracing the hacker's origin. He saw that the hacker was using a 1200 baud connection and realized that the intrusion was coming through a telephone modem connection. Stoll's colleagues, Paul Murray and Lloyd Bellknap, assisted with the phone lines.

After returning his “borrowed” terminals, Stoll left a teleprinter attached to the intrusion line in order to see and record everything the hacker did. He watched as the hacker sought – and sometimes gained – unauthorized access to military bases around the United States, looking for files that contained words such as “nuclear” or “SDI”. The hacker also copied password files (in order to make dictionary attacks) and set up Trojan horses to find passwords. Stoll was amazed that on many of these high-security sites the hacker could easily guess passwords, since many system administrators had never bothered to change the passwords from their factory defaults. Even on military bases, the hacker was sometimes able to log in as “guest” with no password.

This was one of the first ⁠— ⁠if not the first ⁠— documented cases of a computer break-in, and Stoll seems to have been the first to keep a daily logbook of the hacker's activities. Over the course of his investigation, Stoll contacted various agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations. At the very beginning there was confusion as to jurisdiction and a general reluctance to share information; the FBI in particular was uninterested as no large sum of money was involved and no classified information was accessed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[GrahamPlatt]

Yep, that was it. Thanks.